Why people don't use Fedora? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+WorldofGnomeOrg/posts/PuyCtZEp8uP <comment><USER2> The question is more: why are people moving away from Fedora, when you look at the stats: [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics). Fedora 14 was way more used than any other later version.

I think this is related to the brokenness of the system: they pushed early a lot of the debatable technologies (*Kit, NM, systemd) that were not really ready at the time (this is a choice that can make sense) and they argued that the lack of polish was OK for developers, and moved on without "finishing" them. I kind of disagree on this latter point, and this is sometimes way too frustrating (I think the Arch way is more suited on this). And as this is not a rolling release, you need to wait a long time to get the fixes.

Their approach to multimedia, codecs and patents is also one of the more ridiculous of the Linux distributions. And that is pushing also a lot of users out of Fedora, IMHO.

<comment><USER3> As a long-time Fedora developer (and a member of FESCo during the switch over to systemd), I take offense at the idea that we claimed a lack of polish was okay. Far from it; we've spent a lot of time and effort in finishing up all of the tools you just described. I gather from your statements here that you haven't actually _run_ Fedora in the recent past.

Did some of these things land before they were absolutely perfect? Of course. _Someone_ has to be the first to deliver something. You can never figure out what your software is lacking until someone is using it. Fedora takes risks. As we've seen time and time again, once Fedora proves that something works (and has made the effort to polish it up), the other distributions generally pick them up and run with them. NetworkManager, systemd, SSSD, etc... all of these came to Fedora first, were improved upon there and then were adopted widely.

I keep having to remind people: Fedora does have a rolling release. It's called Rawhide and you can move any currently-supported Fedora system to it by running 'fedup --network rawhide'. This will always carry all of the packages that will become the next version of Fedora. It's fairly stable these days (not like its early history, where only the exceptionally brave would dare install it).

Lastly, our approach to codecs and proprietary device drivers is entirely because our hands are tied by legal obligations that other distributions don't have to deal with. (Canonical incorporated in a tax-haven country specifically to avoid this problem; many other distributions simply don't have an entity involved with sufficient money to be worth suing). We know it's an issue. It's one of the reasons Red Hat, Inc. is lobbying so heavily for patent reform in the United States. There are mechanisms out there for getting these tools (such as third-party repositories maintained by our non-US community), but if we tried to ship them in Fedora, we'd immediately be sued into nonexistence. So we have to choose the bad option instead of the catastrophic one.

<comment><USER4> As a perl developer, have some feedback on why i stopped using Fedora five years ago, fleeing to anything remotely more sane:

You guys actually thought it was a good idea to include Perl, but make the unilateral decision to cut out pieces of the Perl core just so the damn thing can fit on a cd-rom, forcing Perl developers in bad corporate environments to deploy Perl core libraries manually.

Not that you're alone in that, but you and your ilk will always have my ire and negative feedback to execs on that until you learn to behave and make amends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although I use it exclusively for the past 5 years, I can see at least 2 reasons why others don't:

1) 13-month support per release. i.e. no LTS support

2) Marketing. And by "marketing" I mean lack of marketing from Fedora/RedHat and too much marketing from Cannonical, which has persuaded people that Ubuntu is more stable and user-friendly for "human beings".

For #2 I can say that I find Fedora more stable(by far) and as for user- friendliness I can't see what more Ubuntu(which I've used for 2 years) has to offer.

<comment><USER6> Ad 1: Do anyone really need LTS for desktop OS? Especially since it's quite experimental distro so rapid changes and experimental solutions are part of what Fedora is.

<comment><USER7> Yes

I want a workstation, not a system that's continuously having things begin/stop working

Fix A, breaks B, etc.

I also want to be able to install something slightly older for not so great hardware and have it be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because Ubuntu LTS provides the right level of hardware support I expect from a consumer grade OS, for the few use cases where I still use GNU/Linux outside work.

Fedora was interesting to use around 10 years ago.

Still, my favorite distros back when I was full into GNU/Linux were Mandrake and SuSE.

</comment><comment><USER9> I used Fedora for about six months as my desktop OS a couple of years ago. It was my first "real" choice using linux. I started with Ubuntu because it was so popular at the time and I wanted to try something new so I chose Fedora because it had the latest and greatest software. That sounds awesome in theory, but in practice I was constantly having things break when I updated my system. The final straw for me was the kernel modules for virtualbox. I do all my web development in VirtualBox VM's and when I was stuck waiting for Virtual Box to release the new kernel modules so that I could get working again the pain was significant enough to warrant a change. I know that is an issue with Virtual Box and not Fedora, but I never have that problem now that I've moved away from Fedora. Looking back, it could have been possible that if I had built Virtual Box from source instead of installing from yum, I may have been okay, but I was still not that comfortable with linux at the time. I switched to Mint, and have been happy with that distro. I really liked Fedora, but if I'm being honest, I've been happier with mint.

<comment><USER10> You could just add linux-kernel to ignored upates list, that would have solved VM tools breaking.

<comment><USER11> I bet some people did. But when you look at the population as a whole, it probably looks like 5% "I can add linux-kernel to the ignored updates list," and 95% "I'm switching back to Ubuntu because it breaks less."

<comment><USER10> I don't think the problems of running a specific distro in a VM applies to general population at all ;) Only a small percentage of developers will ever face the issue, and googling a fix is faster than re-installing whole OS.

<comment><USER11> I don't think anything about running Fedora applies to the general population at all! :P

I'm sure I'm not a typical user, but I've definitely had more Linux VMs than I've had native installs. Even if it's not a majority, I don't think it's uncommon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Redhat is all I new since the late 90's. I'd played around with Debian and Slack a little, but I was die-hard Redhat. Bought the packaged versions, ran it at work and home, servers and workstations

When Fedora came out, I stuck with it. But it didn't feel right. Somewhere around FC 5 or 6 I tried to find a new distro, and didn't like Ubuntu for whatever reason. Too easy. Too mainstream. Too 'brown'. But I ended up using it, and still do to this day.

Back to Fedora:

There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.

There aren't many other users. Chicken and the egg. The support forums, IRC channels, etc aren't as active as Ubuntu. Ubuntu has it's own (very active) StackExchange site!

Let's say I want to use some library and don't want to build it by hand. Chances are someone else using Ubuntu already has it figured out and there's a script I can copy/paste, or a package I can install. Often times that doesn't exist on Fedora and I could make it work but it's just so much easier with so many other people using it and sharing.

<comment><USER13>
        There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.

That's what CentOS is for.

<comment><USER5> No it's not the same. I use Fedora(desktop) and CentOS for servers where I can. But you can't compare CentOS with Ubuntu LTS. CentOS is unfortunately way too far behind in package releases. You get a very stable server environment but you can't realistically use it for any modern Desktop work.

Believe me if you could, I would :)

<comment><USER14> Which packages? CentoOS 7 is running a lot of the same software as Ubuntu 15.04 LTS (which just came out last week or so).

<comment><USER5> Well do you remember the chrome issue? [http://www.linuxveda.com/2013/02/11/rhel-obsolete-by- google/](http://www.linuxveda.com/2013/02/11/rhel-obsolete-by-google/)

Also, last time I checked, KDE, which I use, was many releases behind. Also, in Centos6 which had python 2.6.5(IIRC) was a PITA to update. Actually you couldn't so you had to maintain a source-based installation of 2.7.X side by side. In general you ended up having a source distribution, because the repos had really old stuff. For web development stuff, it was really impossible to have it as your main system.

Maybe CentOS 7 is a bit better, but still I don't think you can use it for modern desktop/devel operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People _do_ use Fedora. In particular, it serves as a great place to try out new features prior to them hitting RHEL, and is widely used as a development platform.

It has a very fast release cycle, however, so it's not always something you want to deploy in production if you still want security updates (fine if you can easily replace your cloud instances though) -- though there are QUITE a many folks running some impressive Fedora deployments in production, including renderfarms and chip design clusters.

<comment><USER16> I use Fedora, as you mentioned, as a development platform. I develop software that manages, among other things, IBM MQ which technically runs on RHEL, but also runs on Fedora for development. Why use Fedora and not RHEL then? Because Fedora has the latest emacs, git, etc. which makes it a much nicer development platform. If I had to actually develop on RHEL I'd probably gouge my eyes out due to older versions of the tools I use. For a long time, emacs in particular was really, really old. I think it's better now, but I still like Fedora.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure to see the point of the submission here, the only answer to the question I can see is:

> So, I switched to Arch after almost 3 blue years. And the only why left for > me is because others do it better!

<comment><USER18> Which is funny because people don't use Arch as much as they use Fedora.

<comment><USER19> [[citation needed]]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is the question and the answer is "It's obvious". That's not a reasonable starting point for a discussion.

</comment><comment><USER21> I used it a while back when I worked at a place that used Linux desktops. I liked it over Ubuntu since yum/rpm is so much faster than deb/apt and because they just seemed to give you a good solid system that just worked. They weren't "trying too hard."

I also like Gnome 3. I realize I may be a minority there, but it was/is a nice UI that just did the basics well: fast, doesn't look like Windows 95 or otherwise like crap, launches my apps, lets me organize them, and otherwise stays out of my way. It supports some nice stuff copied from OS X like being able to move your mouse to a corner and seeing all your windows, etc., and did not seem bug-ridden.

I never had quality problems. Installed fine, worked fine. Hardware support was decent, though these were Dell machines which historically tend to run Linux well. Upgrading was a pain though. I would basically just reinstall.

I was using Fedora 16 through 19.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was using Red Hat on desktop way before there was Fedora. Eventually I switched to Debian and later Ubuntu (since 5.10). I have tried Fedora a couple of times, but I was always disappointed that the system doesn't work out of the box. I have to deal with drivers, I have to install external repositories, etc. Ubuntu always just worked and I get a fully usable system right after installation. That was the main reason why I switched from Debian and why I will not be switching to Fedora.

</comment><comment><USER23> Personally I consider Fedora to be a testbed for Redhat's RHEL, but honestly I don't know if this is true. A bit like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases are a testbed for their LTSes.

With Ubuntu I have pretty much the same system on my servers and on my desktop (I currently use Netrunner[1] because I want a system similar to Ubuntu on our servers -- otherwise I'd be running Arch[2] or NixOS[3]).

If I'd have chosen RHEL/CentOS for on the servers I _might_ use Fedora on my desktop. But in the absence of a huge desktop-oriented community like Ubuntu- and-derivatives have, I would probably feel a little lonely.

Maybe others are also afraid for this loneliness.

1: Netrunner Ubuntu (or Arch) with KDE and sane defaults (like Adblockers) -- [http://www.netrunner-os.com/](http://www.netrunner-os.com/)

2: Arch Linux, a rolling-release distro -- [https://www.archlinux.org](https://www.archlinux.org)

3: NixOS is to other distros, what Haskell is to other programming languages -- [http://nixos.org](http://nixos.org)

<comment><USER24> I use Arch on all my servers and it really works quite well. You have very little magic, very quick updates and generally things just work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Instead of why are they not using, why would you use Fedora? In my view, because you want to be familiar with the ecosystem and potential future changes if you are supporting CentOS/RedHat but want newer features for your worknix. If the above isn't your use case, I would say Fedora has done some very nice bleeding edge stuff, so if you are the kind of person who likes Arch but doesn't like all the manual labor, Fedora might be up your alley.

I do know that I was very impressed with Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2014, until I realized that the proprietary video drivers refused to work in UEFI/BIOS mode. A deal breaker because I'm working on Unreal Engine 4 linux native editor, otherwise I probably would be using it.

edit: Also, I installed both latest stable and beta (22 I think), and some of the issues related to the rawhide packaging production cycle, so I plan on trying it again once 22 is out and/or when the repos are updated for it.

</comment><comment><USER26> The way I understood it was that WAY back(which is just a 5+ years but that's way back in internet years) tons of people used Fedora for development. I seemed to come into the mix about the time things started swinging toward debian/ubuntu and now some other flavours.. My take on this is that change and adoption in the wider developer space has just been increasing like mad.. RedHat is not exactly the platform of the latest and greatest.

Now, I'm not discounting RedHat/Fedora in any way with this but times a change'n. Used to be years old stable releases were the best bet for stability. Now with progress in development and testing how many projects recommend the latest stable release? Other server distros offer recent-ish packages that are very widely used and tested so it's no surprise to me that a lot of development platform usage is trending toward these same distros.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm still mad that Redhat spun off fedora in the first place, 3 days before the announcement I had bought a boxed copy. I returned it, and switched to Suse. Then when Suse got buddy buddy with Microsoft I switched to Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, and now back to Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used Fedora quite happily on my laptop for years until I bought a Macbook. I also used it as a production system for my projects for almost 10 years. Enjoyed the availability of new versions of packages and don't remember encountering many stability issues. But eventually I got tired of the short support lifecycle and switched to CentOS.

</comment><comment><USER29> I use it... I'm not sure how people are having all these issues with Fedora and I am not? I run it on both a desktop (custom built) and a laptop (Dell M4800). It's my everyday and work OS.

</comment><comment><USER30> I used to use Fedora. I guess it was OK. These days, I prefer Ubuntu. I find it simpler and I like apt better than yum. Not that I use Linux all that much; I mostly live inside my OSX terminal.

<comment><USER5> Could you explain what you like better in apt? To me it doesn't make sense.

apt-get, apt-file, apt-cache, apt-blah. And apart from apt-get, the others are not even in the default install(IIRC). Why? Seriously, I don't get it. With yum, there's only yum.

Plus I think that yum handled more gracefully iterrupted operations, but maybe they fixed that in apt by now.

<comment><USER30> > Could you explain what you like better in apt?

It has been some years since I used Fedora (FC5 or FC6). I remember the default yum repositories were missing utilities I wanted and I was also installing stuff from RPM files more often than I would have liked.

Another reason for switching was Ubuntu seemed to have a bigger community and it was easier to get help (at the time, I was still pretty new). Plus it was so much easier to get started with Ubuntu's Live CDs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used to use Fedora, but the updating process never worked for me so I switched to Arch. I am really enjoying the rolling release model, though it is a bit less stable than Fedora.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've used Fedora, off and on, for many years and Red Hat before it, back in the late 90's.

I still have 2/3 of my machines on Fedora. My main development workstation is running Arch now and I plan to migrate my music production workstation and my all-rounder ultrabook as well.

Despite moving away from Fedora, I really can't say much against it and little against it that's actually in favor of Arch or any other distro.

It's a good solid distribution. The only real pain points are installing non- free drivers and that some things aren't packaged for it. I'm comfortable repackaging things, doing manual installs, or adding necessary repos--no distribution has 100% of all software ever created in its repositories.

I mainly switched to Arch because I wanted a rolling release distribution where I wouldn't feel "left behind" after a couple of years of being too lazy to reinstall my whole OS. (Which is different than LTS, because I want more than just security updates and fixes, I want the latest everything, forever.)

The secondary reasons I ended up liking Arch are the AUR and that Arch does much MUCH less for you out of the box in terms of default configurations etc than Fedora does and I was getting a bit frustrated with not having things the way I wanted them while having default configurations that were adequate enough to settle for.. so I wanted a distribution that would be basically almost unconfigured after installation so that I would arrive at the configuration I wanted. In this regard, Arch has been better than Fedora but that isn't "user-friendly" that's more "user-challenging".

Either way, Fedora is a good distro, I would recommend it to a raw newbie or a power user. I can't really say anything other than that, it's definitely Linux. It's also really easy to install. (I auditioned Ubuntu and some Ubuntu- derived distributions some time ago found things like getting my RAID working at install-time to be impossible. I use BTRFS now, but I was trying to use my mobo's RAID-controller then.. which was trivial in Fedora and not happening in Ubuntu.)

If you're curious to know what I don't like about Arch.. it's that updates seem like they should be done pretty regularly and I'm not in the habit of rebooting more than about 2-3 times a year. There was even a year in recent history where I did not reboot once and my uptime was somewhere around 1 year before I irrationally became worried that I didn't -know- that my computer was capable of booting because I hadn't tested that capability in so long, so I rebooted it and then updated just to demonstrate to myself that it would work.

</comment><comment><USER33> It forces me to do a distribution upgrade every 6 months or so.

</comment><comment><USER34> I use it here and there.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think Gnome 3 doesn't quite "do" polish as much as Unity. I am very fussy about fonts looking right, and I'm afraid that at smaller sizes, the font scaling in the Gnome terminal just looked wrong, whereas Unity is perfect in this sense. It's a tiny detail, but Unity kind of feels as polished as a Mac. It also has better dual-monitor support because you can independently set the font scaling for different dpi on internal/external monitor. Crucial if you run a high-dpi notebook in conjunction with a normal fullhd monitor. On Fedora Gnome I had ugly mis-sized title bars and UI fonts on at least one of my monitors.

Second, I do CUDA development, and there are three Cuda 7.0 toolkits downloadable for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 right now, but Fedora 21 is still "coming soon" and has been "coming soon" now for over 6 weeks. Deja vu a few times already on this. Moved back to 14.04, even though I loved the progressive ideas and clean look in Gnome 3.

I still run Fedora on a cubietruck for fun: no problems, works well, but I use the e17 desktop which is a fantastic retro reminder of the 90s if you need an antidote to Jony Ive. It's fast, lean, unapollageticaly black, and terminology looks great and has some neat features for inline graphics if you're a terminal junky.

<comment><USER24> You should generally be able to get the RHEL 7 CUDA releases running on whatever you are currently using. For instance, Arch gets CUDA updates usually on the same day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I really hate the fact that the default desktop (Gnome) copied a bunch of anti-patterns from OS X, like the universal title bar, no taskbar, mixing folders with files, etc. I find OS X to be the least user friendly OS on multiple levels - they leave out critical functionality (while claiming their shit is somehow better) or they hide it.

But, I use it anyway because it has less issues than Ubuntu and with the Gnome Tweak Tool and some extensions I can fix many of the annoyances.

</comment><comment><USER37> All the money Ubuntu spent for promotion.

For laymen Linux = Ubuntu.</comment>


Weekend codes: handling html forms with python mechanize and BeautifulSoup - <AUTHOR> http://stockrt.github.com/p/handling-html-forms-with-python-mechanize-and-BeautifulSoup <comment><AUTHOR> python html forms and sessions handling</comment>


SharePoint Apps, Good,Bad,Ugly? - <AUTHOR>

We are looking to migrate an old Winforms application to our company's 2013 SharePoint site.  Has anyone done any projects in Apps?  How did the project go?  Assuming prior knowledge of JavaScript and jQuery, how steep was the learning curve? <comment><USER2> The concepts behind Sharepoint are really good, it's a fully fledged framework, CMS and has a bunch of plugins for it.

The downside dough is that it's all good when you start, but when you get into more details of your requirements you end up figuring out that it cannot be done in this framework, then you endup doing it outside of it due to it will not meet your needs. OBS: You'll always find some bug that no-one found it till today and you'll be the first guy with that bug once you get there, by then you'll be into 85% of your project. Sometimes you'll find bugs that will be solved "in the future".

If you're into Javascript and JQuery I recommend NodeJS, it's rock solid, very fast and lean JS Framework for Dev, it's server-side. It will certainly be a bootstrap for your project. You can get a hello world running in under a minute, once you get a hang of either Express, SailJS or Meteor you'll have a happy project and time/effort.

Best Regards, Ramon</comment>


iOSTO - Toronto's iOS community - <AUTHOR> http://iosto.ca The iOSTO meetup is the first of its kind in Toronto – where people who are interested in iOS development gather together to SHARE, LEARN, CHANGE, and ACT.  If you're an iOS developer, game designer, marketeer, investor, UX/GUI Designer or active in the iOS community, we want to MEETUP and CONNECT with you.
This will be an informal and casual event and will be held downtown (date/location TBA). This meetup is an opportunity to share iOS projects, ideas, business insight, prototypes and development experiences.  Do you have an app store horror story?  Or successes to share?  What do you think Apple will do next?  Let's talk about Objective C Programming and User Experience
Let's meet and connect in the world of iOS!
Note: for now we are using the Meetup.com platform. <comment><USER2> While this briefly has some attention: who's up for a generic Hacker News meetup?

<comment><USER3> Count me in as well. Perhaps we should set up a group on meetup.com or somewhere similar to get things organized?

<comment><AUTHOR> I already have a paid account, i can invite you two as admins too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any such group for Vancouver?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, right now our efforts are in T.O. we are based here. Who knows what the future may bring. Join the group any ways, good way of keeping in touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm game, but it needs to meet near subway; preferably down- or midtown.</comment>


Largest Sports Analytics Hackathon – DPL 2018 (5th March – 6th April 2018) - <AUTHOR> https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/datahack-premier-league/ <comment><AUTHOR> Largest Sports Analytics Hackathon - DPL 2018 (5th March - 6th April 2018) by Analytics Vidhya. Win cash prizes upto INR 3,00,000.

The cricket fraternity has tasked you to predict individual performances for all players. For each match you need to forecast the following 3 metrics:

\- Runs Scored by every player \- Wickets taken by every player \- Total extras for each match</comment>


The Bredesen protocol for treating Alzheimer's - <AUTHOR> https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2018/10/14/a-cure-for-alzheimers-yes-a-cure-for-alzheimers/ <comment><USER2> As a theory of Alzheimer's, I'm not sure how useful the Bredesen protocol is. The APP pathway is at its core, but there are thousands of components acting in complex ways. Theories need to be falsifiable; it'd be hard to refute Bredesen since it's a sort of Gestalt of the entire field.

As a treatment though, it seems excellent! We know thousands of tiny details about the Alzheimer's process, what better intervention in a complex, poorly- understood disease than to use everything we've got? Bredesen has published successful trials of this "protocol;" that's all we really need to bear in mind.

After all, many drugs are approved despite the mechanisms not being known. Figuring out the mechanism first failed (as all the blockbuster wipeouts have shown us with AD.) Throw the kitchen sink at it, if you can afford the medical bills.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reads more like a PR-stunt than science article.

And as far as PR-stunts go, it's not a very good one. If you want to do an end-run around the medical community (which is sometimes quite justified, such as medical marijuana) you need something compelling.

What he should do is get 10 more patients/volunteers, and youtube his progress over 60 days so we can all see before-and-after.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately this totally ignores the latest discovery of antivirals efficiency and the probable root cause of viruses from the herpes family.

<comment><USER5> On the contrary, Bredesen talks about viruses quite a bit in this recent interview...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7uVZ_0D3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7uVZ_0D3U)

Specific time points listed in the show notes...

[https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dale- bredesen](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dale-bredesen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any description of the actual interventions?

Could this be useful even for healthy people as a way to boost cognitive performance and prevent dementia later in life?

<comment><USER7> The list of interventions in that article is really long.

"Increase telomere length" \- is that even doable at the moment?

"Increase GABA" \- I thought oral GABA supplements do not cross the blood- brain barrier?

Others sure are doable:

"Enhance leptin sensitivity" and "Increase autophagy" can be done AFAIK by intermittent fasting (even better, water fasting several days).

"Enhance mitochondnal function and biogenesis" \- any kind of sports, CoQ10 and photobiomodulation come to mind (BTW I've heard of a pilot study where they greatly improved Alzheimer's for ~2 weeks after a treatment with a near- infrared radiation helmet).

"Reduce homocysteine" \- supplement B12 (ideally, methylcobalamin).

Most of the mentioned hormones (upper half of right column) can be optimized with medication.

"Reduce inflammation" is likely very beneficial, but tricky; eliminate all foods that cause autoimmune reactions?

<comment><USER8> Do they give a dosage for CoQ10?

<comment><USER7> I haven't seen what the authors recommend..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do studies of the efficacy of this method exist, and if so does anyone have a link?

</comment><comment><USER10> More quack science.

See [https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/06/17/the-mend- protocol...](https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/06/17/the-mend-protocol-for- alzheimers-disease-functional-medicine-on-steroids/) for a slightly less breathless account.

<comment><USER11> From the respectfulinsolencecom article:

" '... Interventions targeting specific biological mechanisms are then prioritized and prescribed to optimize key biological mechanisms. Medication doses are specified to an individual's needs. Individuals are re-tested periodically and the protocol is updated as necessary.'

What the hell does this even mean?"

With that type of attitude it will be hard to accept anything novel regardless of it's merits.

<comment><USER12> The author is an M.D. and oncological researcher. New developments in medicine are his bread and butter. That blurb sounds impressive and "oh, I'm really being taken care of!" to a layman, but to someone with actual domain expertise it sounds like "I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track an IP address".

Key questions to consider: What, exactly, is being tested? How? How do the results affect medication dosage? Which medications? How does this differ from existing medical practice where doctors routinely adjust dosages to balance efficacy and unwanted side effects?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "A cure" is a very deceptive headline; it's an allegedly curative personalized protocol, The Bredesen Protocol™.</comment>


We Need This: A Maps App That Algorithmically Finds You the Scenic Route - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/we-need-this-a-maps-app-that-algorithmically-finds-you-the-scenic-route/?mbid=social_twitter

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the routes for London are rubbish. "Beautiful" goes down Kingsway which is concrete-ugly dual rat run; "Quiet" goes across the Millennium Bridge which has about a million people an hour.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1031](http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1031)</comment>


IT's Dirty Little Secret: "We're aware of 'Shadow IT', we just can't stop it" - <AUTHOR> http://openera.com/corporate-its-dirty-little-secret-were-aware-of-shadow-it-we-just-cant-stop-it/ <comment><USER2> Its fun to rail on internal IT. Most organizations inadvertently set the department up to fail and then find themselves shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that they have failed to deliver.

The boys in the basement aren't a bunch of Luddites, before the upstairs staff has even heard of the new tech out there, they're already dependent on it in their personal life (or have demoed and tossed it to the curb).

Spoilers: They actually can stop it, they're the ones managing firewall config after all. You should ask yourself "Why haven't they?" Probably has something to do with the fact the buisness requirements and/or budget preventing them from using the tools everybody would prefer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hadn't really considered things from this angle - I'd be happy to see a win- win-win for the people, IT, and the company.

<comment><USER2> If you want to solve the problem you're discussing in this article, you seriously need to talk to some dejected netadmins.

Most corporate technology problems where a solution exists but isn't used aren't technology problems at all, they're office politics problems (for the sake of argument I also consider business requirements / SOPs to be under the office politics umbrella, if you've ever tried to change them you know this is true).

It's rare that more technology actually fixes the problem. Usually getting more/new technology is a catalyst to changing the underlying social problems, or is just a workaround.

For example, my alma mater wants to implement a new thing to make service better on campus (sorry about the vague-ness, its about privacy of the people involved, and I'm not even supposed to know this). If the project goes through as originally planned, they'll save money and greatly improve services. But, it will never be approved without letting the CIO win a turf war in the process, so the project will end up spending an extra >$500k on unnecessary tech to do it her way. Did I mention this is a public school that really can't afford to be paying that much just to feed egos?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Of course the "security" to which CIOs refer is not DLP or anything cool like that (I'm not implying that DLP works, only that it's cool) but rather their own job security. IT is a cost center, and CIOs only survive when they can account their costs to other parts of the business. If e.g. marketing, sales, and accounting can honestly say they don't need anything that IT is providing, IT might not be around much longer.

From an actual security standpoint, it makes sense to really evaluate how secret your data need to be, and then set up an infrastructure to support that. Individual customer demographic data should be absolutely secret, but that doesn't just mean that marketing people shouldn't upload it to Dropbox so it's easier to pull into their abominable Access DB. That means that the only people who _ever_ see it are CSRs while they're actually talking to the customer. Then IT can add value by isolating CSR desktops on their own 802.1X-secured wired network, while providing a more open network for their other work, and encouraging a shred-all-post-it-notes policy.

I think IT can make legitimate security arguments, but these can't start with "gosh Dropbox is terrible!" Dropbox and other cloud services are used because they are useful. Rather than depriving the individual employee of useful services, find services the business as a whole needs but doesn't realize it needs.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _While nearly two-thirds of companies (60 percent)report they have corporate > policies in place that prohibit such actions, respondents say there are no > real deterrents for purchasing cloud services by stealth. In fact, 29 > percent report there are no ramifications whatsoever and another 48 percent > say it is little more than a warning._

If it's such a big deal that employees are using Dropbox in the office, employ some of those Orwellian tactics bigcorps are so good at: block them. Block them and their entire CDN. Shut off access to Facebook, Google Drive and Box while you're at it. Make them use only corporate e-mail. Is being denied access (at work) to a service they purchased not ramification enough?

Shall we draw and quarter them instead? You're not _powerless_ , you're just _myopic_.

I'd wager that if a corporation has a problem with employees using Dropbox, they've got problems with a lot of other stuff - so why not stamp it all out at once? Or, work with it! Embrace the growing cloud culture. Buy Dropbox for Teams, or Github Enterprise, or what have you. Clearly, your employees want it.

Or, disband the thought and grow up.

EDIT: Comment below generated while the site was not responding to requests.

> _503 Service Unavailable_

It appears the "Shadow IT" has won this round.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. Is this from signing up on web or iPhone app?

<comment><USER4> From an iPhone, but the problem has resolved itself. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The idea there is something wrong with the resourceful workers instead of the lagging IT is perposterous.

IT right now in many companies is living in 2004 still. SO MUCH has changed in the intervening 8 years, it's no surprise that people are going with consumer grade products when corporate IT doesn't deliver modern resources.

<comment><USER6> > it's no surprise that people are going with consumer grade products

Indeed not. IT lags because it's hellaciously expensive to have it any other way. They're more than aware of what's happened over the last 8 years. At my day job, a profitable software shop doing some fairly cutting-edge stuff, we run _everything_ on Lotus Notes. My desktop PC has 2GB RAM and runs Windows XP: a decade-old operating system. We just migrated our source control system from Visual SourceSafe to - wait for it - SVN. It's a gigantic leap forward!

IT recognize that they're not in a position to dictate radical, wholesale tool-and-process change. So they turn a blind eye to private initiatives which help employees stay productive, while gradually and systematically replacing broken pieces of infrastructure.

I use my own personal MacBook Pro for most of my work, relegating the XP clunker to a Notes terminal (a job at which it struggles.) I use Dropbox for syncing my own work and for sharing gigantic virtual machine images with my staff. I run three agile development teams using various cloud-based apps to manage workflow, dropping back to Lotus for necessary book-keeping tasks and ticket assignment. I run a backlog database in Evernote, and we have an internal wiki for mockups and collaborative story editing. In other words, my own personal mix of bleeding-edge and relatively mature.

That's what most businesses are like: a compromise, a heterogenous mix of solutions and processes which evolve over time. There's no shining uplands where every employee exclusively uses the latest tools, while very few workplaces are stuck with uniformly last-era tech.

Even if IT suddenly decided to spend millions of dollars in a company-wide orgy of upgrading, the resulting chaos would bring our business down quicker than the spend would ruin us.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra The described IT painfully reminds me of Soviet-style planned economy. It tries to be the only economy in tow", but as it falls behind due to inefficiency, it tries hard to suppress any other economies that try to arise.

And of course it is done in the name of security! Obviously everyone is trying to steal your secrets and that's why you have to live in outdated and broken environment.

<comment><USER7> A lot of different aspects of companies remind me of this. Usually dictatorial control, rigid hierarchies, policies made with no input from those who will follow them, etc. It's wonderfully ironic that the iconic capitalist organization is often so communist internally.

<comment><USER8> > It's wonderfully ironic that the iconic capitalist organization is often so > communist internally.

I'm not an advocate of communism by any means, but I think the word you're looking for is "authoritarian"; maybe "dictatorial".

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. That certainly forms a part of it, but there are also the aspects of e.g. senseless policies, large sub-organizations doing nothing useful for no good reason, people engaged in turf wars instead of doing something productive, etc. Authoritarian or dictatorial regimes _can_ be quite efficient if the dictator is good, and I don't really associate those features with authoritarianism, but they are definitely stereotypical (if not necessarily real) communism.

<comment><USER9> The workers don't own the means of production in a firm. It's not communist; it's Soviet. Show trials; pointless dig-and-fill exercises; five year plans; Potemkin villages; lunatic dictates from unaccountable leaders; and shadow economies.

Wonderful read: [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or- what-d...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we- need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into- todays-corporate-world/)

<comment><USER7> Precisely. I'm using "communism" in the American stereotype of communism sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really do hate reading articles that praise rogue employees using cloud services.

It's wrong for an infinite string of Data Loss reasons, uncontrolled access to cloud services is no different than leaving a laptop filled with confidential information lying in the front seat of your car.

It doesn't matter how secure the user thinks it is, nobody in Security or Risk Management has qualified or quantified the risk.

To say that Executives would rather stifle productivity is false, they will get the appropriate tools for the job for their workers, that has never been the issue at any organization I've worked for directly, or consulted for.

The real reason nobody cracks down on this, is kind of ironic, although the executives know it's going on, and they will chastise or have you written up for breaking policy/procedure, the truth is that they don't really know what their security posture is and they don't want to know for liability reasons.

There's a lot of willful ignorance, because Security in IT truly is a giant black hole cost center to these people, and rather than seeing it as protective measure, they see it as something that stifles productivity and costs enormous amounts of money.

<comment><USER11> Security in IT can be a way to reduce cost (via risk mitigation), but all too often it's just a form of authoritarian power play by petty tyrants.

In my experience, executives will get "dust in their eyes" if you bend a few rules to get things done in a bureaucratic environment. Plausible deniability, effectively. They want productivity without having to pay for it.

Dropbox, for example, is mostly free (up front), but with a level of risk cost associated with it. An enterprise on-premise Dropbox alternative is not free (up front) and may or may not have less risk than Dropbox. What's the better one? It's hard to measure. What's the ROI of sharing files? Depends on if your management likes fancy numbers games or just approves projects based on personal preference with numbers to make it look like they're doing some due diligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "cloud" is a huge problem in the finance, legal, healthcare, and educational fields. Confidential client/patient/student data leaking out all over the place is a disaster waiting to happen, not to mention often outright illegal.

Let me give you an example: I recently bought a Livescribe Skypen, the new one with Wifi. It automatically syncs with Evernote, and works like a charm. But I can't use it for purpose, taking notes at work, because I can't have attorney work product for a client floating around on Evernote's cloud. That's just a no-go. My father in law encountered a similar problem. He's an IT director at a school district, and he has been trying to get teachers/staff to stop sending student information through GMail/Google Docs. It's almost certainly a violation of student privacy laws to expose that information to third parties without student consent.

I think there is some disruption to be had in this space. People want to use their iPads/tablets/etc and other cloud-reliant devices in their work flow, but at the same time that information has be stored in a way that adheres to security protocols and privacy policies. Google could over a "local Google Drive" service where a company could let its employees use Google Docs, but have that data stored in the company's internal network, with assurances that Google can't troll through the information to target ads or any similar privacy breaching and potentially illegal activity.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Google would be too interested in providing that service, but I don't see why someone else couldn't do it. At some level though, a Google Docs that's restricted to the office or campus is strictly less useful than old- fashioned docs on your laptop's harddrive, edited by normal GUI editors. Would any user want to use that service?

In general, I think you have start mistrusting employees more, though. If an employee can't be trusted not to attach rightfully-secret data to email without heroic IT efforts to prevent that scenario, maybe that employee can't be entrusted with the data period. The old "firewall" method of implicitly trusting everyone on staff with pretty much everything is quite inappropriate for most business situations.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't have to be restricted geographically--iDevices support VPN just fine after all.

And I think there is a disconnect between what users can be trusted to do in person, and what they can be trusted to do with computers. I don't think most users have a good mental model of how the cloud works, how it exposes data to third parties, etc. I imagine most people don't even realize that Google reads your e-mails and documents.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify: are you more concerned about the Googlebot reading your documents to sell you consumer products than you are about employees attaching business or customer data to email or shared docs?

Because I'm operating with a much different threat model. Email is not and never has been secure. It is sent in plaintext unsecured from one unauthenticated mail server to the next. The moment the user attaches data to an email the game is over and we have lost. Sensitive data must be kept in systems that are designed to store sensitive data, and which do not have a "forward to my gmail account" feature. That's how IT can be relevant: provide that system. You might prompt the business to reclassify some formerly sensitive data as rubbish they're allowed to play with, but then their fingerprints will be all over the corpse.

<comment><USER12> Uploading patient/client data to the cloud where a Google bot can read it is a breach of that patient/student's privacy. Blackberry email and the like can make email within the organization secure, and most teachers/doctors have the sense not to email sensitive documents to people outside the organization. However, most don't realize that emailing something to your gmail or uploading it to google docs is a problem. The mental model is still "this is private" even though Google is reading every word.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you've been subjected to more complete DLP systems than I have, but email "within the organization" is not and never will be "secure".

Every time I've seen customer demographic data emailed (although admittedly this hasn't been in the medical field), both the sender and the receiver have been employees (including myself) who weren't entitled to see that data. Organizations need to find more appropriate ways to collaborate, which don't needlessly expand the pool of people with access to sensitive data.

You seem to trust a pool of 100 people, even if they have acronyms following their names, more than you trust a search engine, to not share data in legally negligent ways. That seems ill-advised to me. If the Googlebot were generating lawsuits for breach of privacy we would have heard about them.

I don't think this sensitive customer data should be in Gmail, because I don't think it should be in any email system period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You're really fighting two mantras - 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' vs 'we must build against worst case everything'. The arguments generally come from IT support and legal, respectively.

Realistically things are in the middle. This isn't a surprise. IT shops have to balance current real risks, potential risks, future risks, etc. It's the overly used 'black swan' event in IT that causes problems. It costs $200k per potential problem, and we've got 40, but the business only provides $1M in budget. So the black swan will happen, the business will demand a solution, so now you've got 41 problems - because 2 surfaced while fixing the 1.

To take a step back, it's simply because consumer IT has innovated quicker than both enterprise IT and enterprise security to prevent the takeover. Trying to understand that is a more interesting question, which probably finds its roots in the blossoming technology adoption of a younger generation more willing to consume high tech goods. Eventually enterprises adopt consumer technology, or build really good walls.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is certainly the case with schools too. At my high school, we are provided a username and password to access the school's computers, as well as our own personal storage space on the network. However, students (and teachers) want ways to work on files they have on the school network — it used to be that we would have to email the files to ourselves, but the network administrators have just recently unblocked access to Dropbox. People are realizing that there are websites like Google Drive that will let them access their work from anywhere and migrating away from the school-provided storage.

Last year, someone was able to find a vulnerability in the network in order to install Google Chrome and Firefox. Supposedly, the IT guys were furious — not just at being hacked, but that students were using software that wasn't approved by them. Students and teachers are wising up to what good software is for them, and those choices don't always align with what IT says we need.

<comment><USER15> It's not just about being hacked or using un-approved software.

For example, Google Chrome allows itself to be installed to a user account, bypassing administration requirements which may be that "vulnerability." The install is not particularly big, 50MB or so, so when Little Johnny Hacker does it it may not seem like a big deal. When 20,000 students install it that's almost 1TB, before we even consider them actually saving school work! (If you don't have 20,000 students in your school lets assume your IT resources and staff are appropriately scaled.)

You might ask, when you've got 20,000 people who want a piece of software why wouldn't you just make it available to them? So, let's say your school uses some web tools like Blackboard Learn and somewhere along the line--maybe in Chrome, maybe in BbLearn, maybe in Java, maybe somewhere else--there's a bug and students can't upload their homework to BbLearn with Chrome.

Now you've got 20,000 student freaking out and swarming the help desk trying to figure out what to do, teachers are upset they have to change their plans since it's not the students' fault, and IT is flustered because this is an emergency and not something they can research and test and find an appropriate solution for their environment.

And all this because, clearly, the students know "what good software is for them" and IT is just a bunch of old hacks who can't keep up.

When you work in any collaborative or networked environment some sacrifices will be made to fit everyone in. It's an IT department's job to figure out what technology will make the cut and what won't. Some of those decisions will be good, some will be bad, and some decisions won't actually be in the IT department's control. If you don't like a decision that was made (or wasn't made), you should talk to IT about it. They may tell you to bugger off, or they may make an exception for you or even launch an investigation to launch of complete solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sadly in large companies with IT departments that have accountability and as such have internal costing to another department. Well in those sitauation it is often common for one department head to go behind official channels and outsource for a cheaper price. This sadly bypasses alot of security and other standards the company has. It's not new, and will happen again and again.

One example would be bank that had a website defaced around 12 or so years ago in protest to petrol prices. Turned out that the server was located in a server room with a dog running around in it and would be best described as a spare bedroom almost. The marketing department manager had organised that gem of a disaster. Was lucky as forensics upon that server indicated it had been hacked at least half a dozen times previously. So the defacement hacker had done that bank a realy big favour.

So your company can have the best and most excellent security standards in the World that are completely unbeatable. But it only takes one department head to outsource behind your back or for one individual with a BYOD or the like to plugs in and your open to a screwing.

Clouds are popular as for some reason people have been sold that there all uber secure in that all your worries are removed. They are not, shifting the storage elsewere not only opens up another access point publicly to potentual get at your data but the over comfortable attitude it installs will be inclined to make the clients not as secure as they should be.

If I was a Administrator and I was responsible for the data and liable to getting legaly shafted if there is a breach and the company used clouds and had a BYOD policy then I'd be very much underpaid and with that googling for some form of disclaimer you got every user to sign and every manager to sign. Just so I could sleep at night.

Remember this, when it comes to IT most users are like children and with that they will find a way to break it if one exists and failing that they will find a way.

Block everything website wise and add as an exception, as there realy isn't many websites that companies need you to access. If you want to access any other site then BYOD and network, just don't go driving on the internet in the name of your company. I often wonder if I was to set up a free porn site and then check what companies have employee's browsing it and then have a name and shame of the companies. But I feel that would be cruel upon poor employees with a porn addiction and with that I just can't do it as it would just get alot of people sacked and no company would take any heat from it.

<comment><USER17> WTF?

<comment><USER16> Sorry I realy don't understand your question!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In banks, especially those with large capital market or investment banking arms, you WILL risk losing your job if you try to work around corporate IT. It is basically a guilty-until-proven-otherwise perspective. I have seen it happen multiple times to front desk personnel.

That is also assuming you can, since many banks have super strict policy implementations which would necessitate greater than average technical know- how or investment to work around them.

Of course, there is a cost to this type of infrastructure. Whether you can dilute this cost to make it more accessible to ordinary companies by technical means alone, is something I suspect is not possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember at an old job on a stock trader's last day he emailed himself (from corporate email to gmail) a spreadsheet that contained proprietary models, client holdings, etc. That's a serious breach, and luckily traders are dumb enough to use corporate email to do this because if he used something like dropbox it probably would never have been caught. I don't like being restricted ever, but you can see why a company might try to block these cloud storage services to protect itself and its clients.

<comment><USER20> TBH, client details really should belong to both the firm and the traders, since at the end of the day those clients most likely will continue to execute trades with that trader regardless of what firm they work at. Back when I worked in finance, many traders I knew were hired based on the clients with whom they had a solid professional relationship.

The value of a trader to a firm is essentially their professional relationships with clients combined with the efficiencies and information provided by the firm itself. The trader needs information from the firm and his co-workers to effectively monetize his client relationships, but those relationships really are his/hers at the end of the day. It's not like a trader can leave a firm and some other trader can pick up those relationships right where the other trader left them off. They can try of course, but the relationships are likely to move from firm to firm with that trader.

The spreadsheet is also dubious grey area. Yes, it may be proprietary information created by the trader while at that firm, but it is just as likely to have been created by that trader before he joined the firm that he brought with him when he joined. The only thing that changes when a trader joins a firm is that he ceases to use inputs from the economists and analysts at his previous firm and now begins using the figures from the economists and analysts at his new firm. Proprietary models often are created by a trader and intelligible to that trader and only that trader, unless they happen to have trained a junior trader to understand the ins and outs of their own model.

I was one of the analysts myself and every single model created by any senior analyst was reused by their junior analysts, but was often scrapped anytime a new senior analyst who joined the firm to replace the previous senior analyst. When you have your name and reputation on the model and the investment advice, the tendency is to do a big rewrite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what percentage of Shadow IT practices are due to organizations bending over backwards to appear PCI compliant.

</comment><comment><USER22> You need two networks: one internal without any Internet connection and computers with no WiFi and no USB.

Make people work on their workstation, connected to the internal network and let them use their other computer / laptop to search the Web.

I can name at least one very important chip-designing company that is worth $$$ bn that used to work this way (don't know where they're at now).

<comment><USER23> I work at a facility where all web browsing must be done through a remote desktop session to a server connected to the exterior network, which is reimaged regularly.

Unfortunately they don't keep software fully up to date on the remote desktop server, so the security benefits are lessened. But malicious websites have no way of stealing your secret files.

<comment><USER24> Unless there is a bug in your remote desktop client that can be exploited by a compromised server...</comment></comment></comment>


Electricity use up during day as nation works from home - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52331534 <comment><USER2> Pretty misleading headline, as fourth paragraph: "But overall, the country is actually using less energy because of businesses being closed."</comment>


Announcing Facebook Lite - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/announcing-facebook-lite/

<comment><USER2> So I guess it won't be available in the US. I've been using the browser rather than install the current behemoth app. I'll be curious to see what sort of permissions the lite app uses compared to the current one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm hoping this app will combine fast startup speed with its tiny size. The current Android app is a little bit ridiculous for what is essentially a web page.</comment>


Ask HN: Best budget Linux laptop for a developer? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a laptop to use for Linux development. There have been a number of "Ask HN" topics about this, but this one is a little different - I am not looking for a brand-new, top-end machine, but rather something to use alongside my MacBook Pro (which runs macOS and Windows via Boot Camp). My budget for this machine is only around $300.
If I spend the money on another MacBook (Air or 13" Pro) I am probably looking at a machine of 2011/2012 vintage. Unfortunately I'm not sure the Air machines will be sufficiently powerful for my needs (low-voltage CPUs, only 4GB non-upgradable RAM). Also, all of the the pre-retina MacBooks seem to be let down by their screens: glossy, TN panels with (except for the 13" Air) at most 800 vertical pixels.
Another option is a Lenovo ThinkPad, again probably from around 2012 (with the traditional 7-row ThinkPad keyboard). The ThinkPad X220 seems good, but is let down by its poor quality "clickpad" and, again, poor screen resolution (but at least IPS is an option). The T420s has a more traditional ThinkPad trackpad and better screen resolution, but no IPS and inferior battery life.
So, all of these machines have downsides. For my needs, I think the T420s is probably the best compromise.
Would you recommend (for or against) a ThinkPad T420s for use with Linux?
Is there another machine available for around $300 that I should consider? <comment><USER3> The Thinkpad W520 is the last workstation version with the better keyboard and the speed to feel comparable to current laptops, and is what I currently use. You can find these for around $300-400 on eBay for 16GB of memory and a SSD drive. Lower if you choose to upgrade those features later. The main drawback is that the W520, and its heftier AC adapter, is heavy.

The question is how much battery life do you want. I get around 3 hours with an older battery. I can push out more with different settings.

The Thinkpad T520 is probably an option with better battery life, but I have no experience with it. It's likely also significantly lighter since I don't think it requires the larger AC adapter. I'd try the T520 if I wanted something more portable.

I'm currently running Ubuntu 14.04 and run Windows in a virtualbox with no issues. I've used this machine since 2015. I don't notice a performance difference between this and my older desktop (2010-ish, 16gb, i7) running Ubuntu 16.04.

Edited to add: If anyone from Lenovo sees this thread, I'm snap upgrading if the Thinkpad "retro" is released.

<comment><USER4> I work part time with a friend refurbishing retired business machines and re- selling them online. We get a LOT of Thinkpads obviously, but the T520 is an especially common machine and man is it awesome. Easy to clean, easy to repair, great Linux support, and built like a tank. Best of all, you can get a nice used one really cheap and throw in the max RAM and an SSD for under $300 total.

Edit: 2010~2011 era Thinkpads actually make great cheap Linux dev machines. If you want something a little smaller than the 15" T520, the T420 is great too. And if you want something "ultraportable" the X220 is a great choice and can be had for under $100 used on Ebay.

<comment><USER5> Yes Thinkpads are great, specially second hand ones.

Many companies tend to replace them after a few years so there are a lot of them on the market, and they are generally quite cheap.

Once thing to keep in mind however is the screen. At least for older ones, it tends to be bellow average (low resolution, low contrast, low fidelity colors, etc) as companies tend to "forget" to check the "good screen" option. It's obviously a generalization, there are some with good screens, but keep it in mind.

I'm the happy owner of an x61, upgraded with 4Go of RAM and an SSD, plus a new battery, it still going strong.

Personally, I'm always reluctant to pay a lot for a laptop. A laptop can, easily be stolen, fall one the floor, be damaged in any way. Cheap secondhand thinkpads fit my needs wonderfully in that regard. A few years ago, just 2 weeks after I bought my x61, I slipped on an ice patch, fall on it heavily and the screen was dead. I just bought another one, exactly the same, swapped the disk and I was good. It wasn't a big dent on my budget, it would have been a different story with a brand new Macbook Pro.

Other notes:

I've a thinkpad T460s (i7) at work, it tends to overheat a little, I would not recommend it. And there are a bunch of X1 carbons there to, they are not very reliable machines. Personally I would stick with the basic X2x0 or T4x0 models.

Thinkpads are really easy to repair, easy to disassemble and there are a lot spare parts on ebay (keyboards, battery...)

I couldn't find it again, but back in the day, there was a webpage which gives you the configuration details from the type number at the bottom, it was really convenient to get all the config beforehand from the seller, you just needed to ask in this type number. Don't know if it still exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you have already have a Macbook Pro, just buy an external USB 3.0 SSD drive, and install linux on that. It's cheaper and lighter than a second laptop, and will perform as well or better than a $300 laptop.

You can install Debian onto the USB SSD using the instructions here: [https://wiki.debian.org/MacBook#Install_Debian](https://wiki.debian.org/MacBook#Install_Debian)

Notes:

\- Don't cheap out and use a regular USB 3.0 flash drive. It must be an SSD drive. I use this 60GB one ([https://world.tmall.com/item/520064055360.htm?id=52006405536...](https://world.tmall.com/item/520064055360.htm?id=520064055360)) but 120GB or more would be better.

\- Ignore the instructions about rEFInd: you don't need it for this use case

\- You might need to do something special to get the webcam working, but the info is on the page

\- If you're using a mix of retina and non-retina screens (e.g. retina MBP with regular 1080p monitor), you should know that linux doesn't make it as easy to get working as OSX does

<comment><USER7> Whoa that's so cool USB SSD is it as small as an ultra fit? Will look

<comment><USER6> Size compared with a Beijing subway card: [https://goo.gl/photos/2W3JjfdLcjsggwSy6](https://goo.gl/photos/2W3JjfdLcjsggwSy6)

<comment><USER7> Oh snap that thing is massive. No offense or anything. I thought they condensed SSD into a USB. I use this SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0

<comment><USER6> Yeah you can run linux from your ultrafit, but it would be slow. I think you can even run it from an SD card, but it would be even slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm using a (Thinkpad) T42p from a dumpster, works fine. 1600x1200 screen, good keyboard, trackpoint and touchpad, up to 6.5 hrs on a single charge. I put an SSD in the thing (using a $2 PATA-SATA converter) which makes a world of difference. Since most development happens on servers anyway the relatively underwhelming performance (1.8GHz Pentium M, max 2GB) is not much of a problem.

Especially if you plan on developing web apps I can only recommend to use an older-generation machine. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it is an easy way to make sure your programs work well on both older as well as newer hardware.

<comment><USER9> I'm currently using a T43 I was given it by a friend.

I completely completely agree with you regarding the concept that older hardware results in better-designed and faster software. (If I had the money and I could deliver a pallet of T42s to Google's front door as a protest- prank, I would.)

I'm hesitant to put an SSD in mine though. The disk is swapping about 65% of the time I'm using the machine (although I have 2GB)... I fear I'd wear through the flash cells in 6 months. I'm completely serious.

<comment><USER8> No problem there, the flash wear problem is overstated to begin with, SSD prices have plummeted so even if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this - you can just buy a new drive. My (120 GB, Intel) flash drive on the T42p (maxed-out at 2GB) has worked flawlessly for about 3 years now, with no sign of giving up. S.M.A.R.T. data is unreliable on this device, unless you really believe it has an uptime of 904608h+33m+15.150s, 5468289 uncorrectable errors (increasing by 2 per second), etc. More believable are the host write 32MB (81785) and NAND write 1GB (3726) numbers. Media wear sits at 0%.

I.e. just put an SSD in the thing and be done with it. Just make sure to get a big enough device if you're worried over write exhaustion as write lifetime is directly related to device size.

<comment><USER7> Would you get a warning before the SSD completely failed/was unusable?

<comment><USER8> In theory, yes. In practice, maybe. Techreport did an endurance test on SSDs which gives some insight in the failure mode. The last article in the series can be found here, links to earlier episodes can be found through the article:

techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

Some excerpts on the failure mode:

...all of the drives wrote hundreds of terabytes without any problems. Their collective endurance is a meaningful result....

...The Corsair, Intel, and Kingston SSDs all issued SMART warnings before their deaths, giving users plenty of time to preserve their data...

...Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths...

...If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don't always fail gracefully. Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot. The others were immediately unresponsive, possibly because they were overwhelmed by incoming writes before attempted resuscitation....

...Also, watch for bursts of reallocated sectors. The steady burn rates of the 840 Series and 840 Pro show that SSDs can live long and productive lives even as they sustain mounting flash failures. However, sudden massacres that deviate from the drive's established pattern may hint at impending death, as they did for the Neutron GTX and the first HyperX....

<comment><USER7> Man it sounds somewhat involved. It's not as easy as drop-in with regular HDD's. Still I get the benefit... so what do you do? Based on its class, estimate the lifetime? How would you do that? Do an average read/write count per day or something?

Thanks for the info. This is separate technology than the emmc or whatever that's prevalent in new "cheap" laptops now that is used for main memory. Like the laptops that come with 16GB storage haha.

<comment><USER8> Make sure to have an up-to-date backup of the important bits on the drive (I'm using rsnapshot [1] with a 1h interval, backing up to a mirrored server), otherwise just use the thing for what it was intended to do. I've had quite a few magnetic drives fail without warning as well so I assume storage to be unreliable and act in accordance.

<comment><USER9> Heh, my storage situation is interesting. I'm currently trying to squirrel spare change away where and as I can so I can get a ZFS pool; it's mildly irritating that the "perfect" price/performance ratio means you need to get $1k in drives before you can begin.

I'm aware of ACD ([https://redd.it/5s7q04](https://redd.it/5s7q04)) but I'm in Australia, where "real" internet (ie, upload speeds above 100KB/s) are a dream for 95%+ of the country (including me), so the ~5-8TB of (un-deduplicated) data I have here would take _at least_ 1090 days to upload if I did it 24/7 _and had perfect and unwavering 100KB /s upload_. During which my entire connection would be unusable because TCP. Heheh.

The "send me a HDD" route won't work because the data has been sliced-and- diced in various ways (the worst case example being a disk image tar+split'd to fit on a FAT32-formatted HDD) and I need to de-Rube-Goldberg everything first. That would take me about 6 months, and I'd definitely want a properly mirrored setup for that.

Moral of story: I _probably_ don't want your old computer with its tiny HDD. (And if I could go back in time and tell myself that the hotswappable disk thing I was hearing about in 2006 _most emphatically_ did not apply to my two 486s, and that plugging that HDD in with power on would not only take out the PSU but also the floppy drive controller, that may have helped things a bit... what I had to do in the end was duplicate the HDD contents between the two machines in question so I had my files available on both - the triplicates-of- my-duplicates snowball started there, I think.)

I honestly won't be surprised if, once I've deduped everything, I only have about 50GB of truly important stuff, and a few hundred gigs of "I can redownload that if I need it".

<comment><USER7> do you use fdupes? I wish it would combine all the files into the same "copy" folder rather than scattered, whichever one happens to be the "index" copy that is left.

I guess your alternative could be to use local storage.

haha, I cry about my own problems with 1Gbps connection.

<comment><USER9> I ran fdupes on a random directory once, very interested to see what it would do. After spending an extraordinary amount of time checksumming everything (I don't even remember if it had a progress bar) it spat out a _very_ confusing text file I wasn't able to make sense of at all.

My plan is to write a multithreaded disk [re]indexer (since full indexing sadly seems to be the only solution at the moment; no filesystems have a "fast dump" mode yet), along with a bunch of utilities that try to make sense of the generated index.

(By "[re]indexer" I mean that, if you pass the indexer an old database, and any file has the same size and mod/ctime as what's in the old database (or matches any other rule you specify), the checksum for that file won't be recomputed. You could also pass in an old database and simply tell the indexer to scan a specific set of subdirectories on disk that you know have changed, and the indexer would copy simply copy the old database to the new for every path/file outside the ones you've specified.)

Building an index and then working off of that has a lot of benefits - instantaneous visualization without needing to rescan the disk on every program start, realtime similar-file searching, listing every file with the same checksum as you browse around, etc.

Obviously this tool will wind up on here when I eventually (:P) do write it. I probably should think about starting on it already but in all seriousness I'll likely be motivated to start working on it once it looks like I'll finally be able to put my ZFS pool together. (Hopefully that plan doesn't backfire, and I don't get the remaining $ all at once and abruptly wind up with a bunch of disks and no tool... and we wind back to the first approach, of just starting _now_ )

Local storage is definitely the goal, once I can afford it (expensive medical issues that prevent me from straightforwardly getting a traditional job are _really_ fun, FYI xD). I don't really find cloud storage flexible enough for my requirements at this point.

Sadly the NBN has been sufficiently politically meddled with that it's not likely to be 1Gbps - and indeed current installations are only 100Mbps with no path past that. But I heard recently on a news story (on the radio of all places) that if people need an upgrade path with the NBN, that that will be available. Nobody mentioned how much said upgrade would cost, but I'd be willing to drop a few hundred on it once I have a job. What on earth issues do you have with your connection?! lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice question man, I've been scouring ebay for the same rough specs($300-$500). Long battery life, thin, 13.3", 8gb ram, i5 at least, 1080p screen minimum.

The ones I found were: Asus Zenbook, Samsung Ativ, Lenovo Ideapad (2-in-1)

The Ativs are really nice except for the "Windows 8 COA BIOS key in system, need to download copy of Windows 8 from Samsung" that was one ebay listing I saw.

The Carbon X1 is a good series but has fan, also battery life not good and 14"

I'm favoriting your question as I'm looking myself. It's tough man, a lot of the older computers don't have good battery life or are stuck with 4GB ram. Macbook Air 2013 is probably your best bet as far as actual battery life/build quality but it runs Apple OS, you could dual-triple boot that was an option I was considering myself however the battery life is partially software on Apple's side.

The Dell 13.3 edge displays are nice haha, surface book would be nice as well, but yeah out of budget.

There are some other ones that slip my mind. So many times I was sold on a laptop then found problems like heat/battery life/display problems.

Right now I get away with 13.3" (Samsung Chromebook 2 Exynos $140 (slow processor)) and Cloudbook 14 by Acer (battery life $99 good battery life longer in Windows than Linux with TLP I tested 9+ hrs), but these suck 4GB ram, 2GB ram respectively. The chromebook what's nice about it is the screen/size. I have crouton on the chromebook but it's not as convenient as just having full linux (watching shows better on chromebook side).

I'm mostly productive on my 8GB desktop though with 2 screens. Laying back coding in bed has yet to be proven productive for me haha but that's the "reason" I'm trying to find a good dev ultrabook for cheap. I'm also concerned about theft, so the idea of lugging around a Dell 13.3" edge display xps... I don't know what I would do if someone just stole that... so a "disposable" but useful laptop is appealing. This Acer Cloudbook 14 is close but that fixed 2GB ram damn...

Keep in mind my search is for ultrabook, hopefully the fans either don't exist or are positioned in a way where you can set your laptop on your lap.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thinkpad x220 or t420s. You can get a USB3 port on the i5 t420s, but the battery life is generally shit.

x220, you need to get an i7 to get a usb3, but the battery life is great, and it's small, and you can upgrade to 16gb ram.

Stick with thinkpad. the 20 series is the last series to offer the classic keyboard. After that, e.g., x230, t430s, you get chiclet keys.

x61, x201, x220. Stick with those. I'd go with x220, but you could even get an x61, and put 8gb of ram in it...it's ddr2 though, so it will be expensive.

<comment><USER11> >x220, you need to get an i7 to get a usb3

Are you sure about this? I have an i7 x220 and it doesn't come with USB3. I think I remember having a tough decision between the x220 (USB2 + nice keyboard) on the x230 (USB3 + chiclet keyboard).

<comment><USER10> Yes, I'm certain. I have usb3 on my x220.

[http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X220](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X220)

"Three USB ports (of which one is USB 3.0 on the i7 model)"

I would check and make sure that you got one with an i7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got my X230 for £168 a year or so ago (i5-3320M, 4GB, 320GB, I shortly added a 256GB mSATA SSD for ~£50), the same place is currently selling T430 and T520 for the same price. I got an X61 a couple of years before that for £65.

You just have to find a decent refurb or recycling shop (i.e. those that take and resell ex-corporate stock); I imagine you've got an even wider choice in the US.

<comment><USER13> Unless you want a gaming machine, if you care about price, this is the only way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've bought a fair amount of used laptops - for around $100-$150 each - <USER2> eBay for real, paid development work.

For $300 you'll come out great. Any ThinkPad will do, but look it up on thinkwiki.org first.

There's a huge variety of these machines and they're all pretty solid. You can pick your flavor. I tend to optimize for being lightweight, high RAM, 64-bit. Make sure you get one with a built-in WiFi card and reasonable battery life. All this will be in the item description.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not sure what the HN opinion of Reddit is, but they have a forum intended for your exact use-case:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/)

Might be some help to find there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a way cheaper machine myself that I still use everyday.

It's a T60 with upgraded CPU (T7600), second hand 60GB SATA II SSD, 3GB RAM (limited due to chipset bug), ExpressCard with USB 3.0 and a 9-cell battery which lasts for 1/2 hours.

I spend around $100 for this machine in total, only $25 for the T60 itself.

I'm not using this particular machine because the specs are so great, but because I found it on Ebay and it was painted yellow. It's such an awesome thing. It runs Debian with XFCE4 fine, but websites like Facebook in Firefox isn't that fast. For development purposes it's perfectly fine.

I'm thinking about upgrading this machine with a motherboard from a T60p with a FireGL GPU one day, but I have to research if that would work.

You could take the same route as I did, but if that's too much work I'd go for a X201 with SSD and 8GB RAM.

<comment><USER17> Ha I just finally stopped using my ~2008 T61 with similar specs (now acting as my pfsense router). Was a great machine, but realistically a core2 duo is just too under powered these days. I had 4GB ram and a 128GB SSD and even looked into upgrading the cpu for a bit. You could get the highest spec CPU from ebay, but cost for such little gain made it not worth it.

<comment><USER16> Yep, I have the highest spec CPU for the T60, the T7600 :)

I paid $15,- on Ebay for the CPU with free shipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently went through a similar process. My budget was ~£300. I ended up getting a Thinkpad X230, i7, 8GB RAM, SSD from Ebay. I'm happy with my choice and the machine is a decent workhorse

<comment><USER19> I bought an x230 from Lenovo's outlet about 2 years ago. i5 with 4gb of ram and a 500 gb sata drive. I threw in an m2 SSD and 16gb of ram and it's great. I'll eventually replace the 500 gb sata drive with an SSD but for now it's fine and the total cost was probably $600. Has to be close to half of that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have you considered running VirtualBox/VMWare Fusion/etc on your MBP and doing Linux dev in a VM?

<comment><USER21> Exactly what I was going to suggest.

If you're just going to mess around to see what it's like developing running Linux, save the $300 and do it in a virtual machine to start with. Then if you like it you can buy some hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very happy with a ASUS Zenbook UX305FA. Everything worked with no issues when I put Ubuntu MATE on it. It feels more-or-less identical to a 13 inch MacBook Air.

It was ~$400, but "used" in my case was relatively new and unused. I bet if you found a version with a blemish or two it'd be ~$300

</comment><comment><USER23> Thinkpad is a good choice. If you live in the US and you budget is $300 you can easily get a T430s (s is thinner than non-s). If you are patient and willing to spend some time on ebay you could find X240 or T440 under $300. I would try to get FHD IPS display. If you can't find one, you can get one for ~$60-$80 and replace it yourself (very easy to do and manuals and howto videos made by lenovo are available online).

EDIT: Many used thinkpads come with HDD. I highly recommend replacing it with SSD. I got the cheapest 120GB sandisk SSD from amazon (~$50) for a X230 I got from ebay and I am very happy with it.

<comment><USER24> I use T430s and would recommend getting a regular T430 instead of T430s. The height difference is minimal but you can get a 9 cell battery for T430.

<comment><USER23> Good point. I did not know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a huge thinkpad fan. I'd totally go with one of these if you have a bit more budget: [http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/lenovo- thinkpad-x62-mod](http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/lenovo-thinkpad-x62-mod)

If you're going for a regular second-hand thinkpad (which is also a fine choice for linux in my opinion), the poor quality trackpad doesn't have to be an issue. Many people swear by the trackpoint 'nipple', once they get used to it.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you're going to be SSH'd into servers (or other devices) most of the time, a Chromebook could be an option. Just get one whose hard drive can be upgraded if need be.

</comment><comment><USER27> Asus has good quality laptops for a reasonable price. These days you can get a new Asus laptop with 4GB RAM for less than $300. I always do a full install of the most current version of Ubuntu LTS, and it works great on Asus hardware, including Wifi. I purchased my first Asus laptop back in 2011, and its still running well, even after multiple OS installs and lots of heavy data transfers. Purchased another Asus in 2015 for $275, have not had any problems.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used a T420 for 3 years in university. Great sturdy laptop, great upgradability. Still up and running on Arch Linux at home.

You can have a similar config (2520m with the nvidia) with a T420s for pocket change as we speak. While it cannot have a 9 cell battery like the T420, you can swap the DVD Drive for a battery!

You can also put in a m.sata SSD and remove the 2.5inch drive.

Great hardware for Linux.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you see a Chromebook that you like the specs on, the crouton project can turn it into a dual boot system with your distro of choice. I found it surprisingly easy to use and it works really well. Since it's a chroot under the hood, the new distro can use all of the device drivers from ChromeOS, so all the hardware works perfectly.

<comment><USER30> If you go for a Chromebook, check out this Xubuntu-based OS that's designed for ChromeOS devices: [https://galliumos.org/](https://galliumos.org/)

You can also permanently install a non-ChromeOS OS on (some?) Chromebooks, but you might have to fiddle with a BIOS flash and a write-protect screw first.

<comment><USER31> I use GalliumOS on a Dell ChromeBook 13 (i5/8GB). I don't have any issues except that the machine reboots itself during sleep sometimes. That's not a big deal for me, so I am very happy with the experience besides missing Ubuntu Unity after working on it for several years now.

EDIT: I used chrx to install it. I don't recall any issues during the process. I also upgraded the SSD to 256GB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Others have mentioned using crouton with a Chromebook. I dual boot my Chromebook with GalliumOS, a distro just for Chromebooks, and have been very happy with it. Since Chromebooks have a limited set of hardware, you can see whether a particular model is supported before you install.

<comment><USER7> Is your Chromebook intel? I had the "misfortune" of picking an ARM-based Chromebook haha, only bad thing so far is I can't install VS code. Geany... haha what is that?!!!

Also the 4GB ram kind of sucks. How is GalliumOS to you? I use trusty (not os) primarily for i3.

<comment><USER33> > only bad thing so far is I can't install VS code

This is worth a note for many people. There are astonishingly few good editors that you can easily compile or get binaries for ARM CPUs. Upside: I ended up picking up Vim and Spacemacs because of this.

Also note that crouton can be a bit hacky on those devices - I set up chroagh 3 times, and for each time, the X11 integration stopped working after a couple of weeks for some reason. Working from the TTY is still pretty doable, though.

Also: Install the chroot on an SD card. Crouton requires you to put your device into Dev-Mode and press a hotkey on each boot. I ended up touching my spacebar during the prompt by accident once, and the thing happily wiped its flash memory.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you most likely won't be able to run a custom kernel, even if you boot your own system. So, there's no guarantee you'll have the fancier options at your disposal (iotop, setting inotify- limits etc).

<comment><USER7> Oh my god that happened to me the wiping memory. That's what happened? Good to know man thanks.

That super loud beep(s) too what the heck.

Does ChromeOS by default implement something like TLP? I installed it in Linux side, but not sure if when you run linux if the TLP carries over. Maybe it doesn't matter anyway , my Chromebook still has like 95% capacity thank fully and it pulls on average like 10 Watts with a 35Wh battery... but it lasts I don't know 3-5 hrs trying to keep it between 30-80% charge.

Thanks a lot for the great tips. What about read/write stuff on SD I think I heard it's hard on the SD card versus say USB 3.0 (use that for my Acer Cloudbook).

Also what's up with right-click on Chromebooks, weird ways.

<comment><USER33> > Does ChromeOS by default implement something like TLP?

I would assume the default system does power management quite well (at least on my device it does), so if you're running a chroot that shouldn't matter too much. If you boot your own system I'm not sure, though, I guess the best one can do is try.

If you follow the instructions to set up an Arch Linux[1] boot system for your device for example, it will most likely just copy the ChromeOS kernel over, so I would assume the support also depends on the device's system...

[1]: [https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/](https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/)

<comment><USER7> Arch linux?! Whaaaaa haha, you think I have a brain to follow directions!

Anyway thanks for your time.

I can't seem to find 8GB chromebooks, they might not exist yet and when they do expensive oh well. Quit being poor is what I keep saying to myself. "Hey buddy why don't you snap out of it and quit being poor?" haha.

<comment><USER33> To clarify: I'm not suggesting you have to use Arch; pick whatever suits you most :-)

I only wanted to point out that they don't have their own kernels for some devices, which indicates that it isn't practical to use a completely self- compiled kernel for whatever reason (I would assume there are some crucial blob drivers).

Good luck with your setup!

<comment><USER7> At some point it does seem more effort than it's worth, you know how about you budget and save to get a decent computer.

yeah anyway thanks for the information

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I faced the same dilemma this month. I was looking at the T420 as well as some other Lenovo and IBM laptops.

I went for a refurbished Dell E6410 from eBay (2.6Ghz i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD) and installed Ubuntu on it. I got it for £170 ($210). It is surprisingly good (especially considering the price).

</comment><comment><USER35> As recommended on Reddit, an Acer Aspire ($350) stands out with considerably more mentions than the rest in the $200 to $500 range: [http://laptopkarma.com/?price=200+AND+500](http://laptopkarma.com/?price=200+AND+500)

</comment><comment><USER36> my $0.02: I would go for T420s.

\- you don't really need IPS for development.

\- you can swap battery easilly in T420s and you can get additional in the ultrabay if battery life is really big concern. (in any case always get a new battery if you are buying second hand laptop)

</comment><comment><USER37> X220 is good. You'll want to start using the Trackpoint if you're using it regularly, and an external monitor is always an option if you need a higher resolution.

You may also look at X200 with LibreBoot. Quite a lot of places sell these.

<comment><USER33> I'm using a X220t I bought second hand and am pretty happy with it, too.

I have to ask, though: Are you an avid user of the track point? Are there any hidden settings or "techniques" I'm missing?

I really never got to terms with them and often still use the (not that great) mousepad if I really have to do something with the mouse pointer...

(Of course, since I mostly use Spacemacs/Qutebrowser, that's not too often the case anymore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would go with Chromebook with 8GB memory.

Thinkpad is overpriced. Zenbook is good alternative to Mac.

</comment><comment><USER39> I loved the ThinkPad T420s when I worked with it at me previous job.

Extremely easy to upgrade, well built, difficult to damage, great battery life with minimal TLP configuration, and the slim form factor was great for mobility.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thinkpad T420 even should have you some money left for ram or ssd upgrade. I use mine as daily driver and love it

</comment><comment><USER41> A Chromebook would be the only non-crap new machine for that budget. You can install Linux on Chromebooks.

</comment><comment><USER42> Thinkpad X201.

</comment><comment><USER43> Thinkpad T420. $100 on Craigslist

<comment><USER43> I added a new keyboard ($40) and SSD I already had. Feels like a new machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Vagrant on the existing Mac or develop in the cloud. Why have ANOTHER computer?

</comment><comment><USER45> If you go Air, the i7 are quite fast and can get 8GB RAM.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thinkpad.

</comment><comment><USER47> Thinkpad T500 is also very good for your usecase. You can swap the built in hdd or an ssd, and put the old hdd in a hdd caddy in the place of the cdrom.</comment>


Want To Build A Startup Ecosystem? Build A 24hr Cafe w/ Free Wifi. - <AUTHOR> http://techli.com/2012/09/startup-ecosystem-free-wifi/

<comment><USER2> That is why, probably, there aren't any tech hub's on Mexico,</comment>


When should you call yourself a senior developer? - <AUTHOR> https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/25564/when-should-you-call-yourself-a-senior-developer <comment><USER2> When your title is senior dev is when you should call yourself senior developer, no? I didnt think it was a title you just gave yourself...</comment>


Laid off from the Job at startup. Whats next? - <AUTHOR>

Just got laid off from startup. Company is letting go all developers due to lack of second round of funding. Wondering what next to do. Start my own startup or work for big company?
I love startup environment. I am ready to work for 16 hours but same time I need to support basic needs for family. Mind is saying to work on my own idea or work for startup. But heart is saying to get Job.
Help me with the brain storming. <comment><USER2> Well if I personally was in your situation it would be this...

Step 1) Go get a tech job at a place with normal hours, doing something you know well with lower stress. Finding this type of job is not incredibly easy but also not incredibly hard if you open up to the less exciting non-'hot' companies. Basically the goal is to earn decent money while conserving your energy.

Step 2) After work, use your remaining energy and funds from your day job to find traction for and build your business. In essence your persona from 9-5 is your VC for your entrepreneur persona at night.

Step 3) Once you have real satisfying income from your business then dedicate yourself 100% to your business.

\-----

Why not some of the other choices...

\- Working only a normal job - If you have the itch it will never stop itching. You'll be miserable if you only work for a big corp. Sorry I can tell you that itch will never leave you alone.

\- Betting everything - There are some good stories about people that have achieved amazing success doing this and we hear them over and over because they are just that - good stories. I've known many people who have dropped everything and risked it all on starting their own company... the result: unfortunately typically losing it all. The other option is to try to find a VC. In my opinion, accepting VC money is not something to aspire to but obviously most of SV largely disagrees with me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That itch is the issue. Thats what I am worried about. Will more thinking based on the ideas I am getting from you guys. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You might consider doing consulting to keep your cash flowing, and working on your own startup on the side until you're ready to go full time on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> how much money do you have in the bank?

If you have at least 6 months to support you and your family, you could try your hand in your own startup.

If not, I would suggest finding a job. Making money with any company usually takes much longer than you would expect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have enough to survive for 6 months. So leaning towards own startup. It is time ....

<comment><USER5> Jaggu, if you have family working for big company and stable income is only way to go. Dont risk.</comment></comment></comment>